


Survive

by thephilosophah



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, the bad part is its normalization though, there's violence but it's mostly implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 09:39:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3763330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thephilosophah/pseuds/thephilosophah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life on Alternia is different for every troll, but one thing is common: you have to fight for your place there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survive

**Author's Note:**

> It wasn't clear which segment was whose so I added their symbols to make it easier to understand. They're in hemospectrum order.

♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈  
You feel a hard tug at your hair. Someone must be trying to pull it from the surface, hoping to make use of the height advantage of your being in the hole you’re currently digging. Poor bastard.

You grab your hair from the roots and pull it down hard, crouching your entire body and effectively pulling the offending troll in the hole. They fall face-first and you lean back to avoid the off chance of them having long sharp horns sprouting straight out of their head that could scratch you badly (they don’t).

You try to come up with a sensible thought process that may have passed their mind when they spotted you – oh hey, there’s a girl below ground level, I’m just gonna rip her hair out. You can’t think of a way for them to think they could’ve won a scuffle with a half-buried troll. Unless they’re a psionic, in which case, hey, you are one too. Sure you’d prefer to avoid using them, but your psionics can easily win you any fight. How many trolls can get the dead to fight by their side?

Just you.

During the second it takes the troll to stand up, you dig your heel in the ground and swing your lower body. You knee them in the face and brown blood stains your sock.

You climb out of the hole, not in the mood to be moving bodies right now.

You’ll just let the fauna take care of that and return another night to finish your digging.  
♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈♈

♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉  
It’s been a while since you last saw another troll.

Your lusus brings you food, but he’s too small to carry as much as you’d like to have to eat; although having lost willful use of half your body lessens the amount of food you need, the tiring process of building up in the functional part in order to compensate makes you hungry all the time.

Hunting on your own is weird now. Sure you could survive on plants alone, but you need meat for the muscle you’re trying to build. Your tactic is making traps and staying close by until some animal gets caught, since you don’t have the heart to manipulate them into coming to you and staying still as you kill them.

You try not to think about the life of what happens to be between your fangs every time you eat. You don’t succeed.

You manage to get strong enough to move entirely on your arms if you have to. You have not been eating enough for your needs. You hate the feeling of not having won your meal over a fight with it, because what kind of sick troll doesn’t regard the animal they choose to feed on as a worthy opponent?

You feel ashamed to not have met or talked to your food. You know most people don’t even care. But you do, you do care and it’s important that you keep it up. You confess your shame to a featherbeast, one night, and the poor thing is so young, it doesn’t have a grasp on its own morality, so it just gives you a puzzled look and tells you that you have to eat, so eat you shall.

Yes. Eat you shall, you think, as you swallow a bite of that very featherbeast, and call out on a number more meaty animals to drop dead at your doorstep.  
♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉♉

♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊  
An adult troll stares you down – which is weird, because adults don’t interact with young trolls other than an occasional culling. Not to mention how few adults reside on Alternia; mostly actors, but other artists occasionally make it as well. They don’t normally get close to youngsters, but in a big city like the one you live in, everything’s possible.

You’re pretty sure it’s a she, at least judging by appearance (a poor judge, but it’s all you have right now) and she’s not currently in the process of culling you, so you’re mildly surprised. She’s just standing there, looking at you.

Not your eyes. It’d be pointless to look at another troll’s eyes. If an impression of a youngster is needed, the important information is primarily on their sign, secondary at their horns, and, if it’s a special occasion, in their build.

Your sign tells her you’d be useless in a fight and that you’re gonna die at the same age she became an adult. Your horns tell her you’re a mutant, an extreme one at that, if it affects the number of things you’ve got on your head. Your build tells her exactly how useless you are in a fight and how easily she can murder you.

She throws her head back and laughs. When she looks at you again, she’s pulling out some sort of blade from behind her back.

She doesn’t get to see your eyes. She’s lifted off the ground and has half a second to be shocked before you crush her skull.

She really should have looked at your eyes.  
♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊♊

♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋  
You don’t do bleeding.

It’s not a weakness thing. Hell, bleeding is badass, having your skin cut open and maintaining your ability to keep fighting is pretty much the epitome of cool. Just your opinion. You don’t think bleeding means weakness.

Sometimes, you really wish you could just take a hit. It’s stupid how many fights you’ve fought in the most painfully slow manner possible so you wouldn’t bleed. Or bruise. Or flush. Or tear up.

You like your sickles. They’re sharp and can easily and quickly hurt your opponent. They’re double-edged and don’t have a specific motion needed in order to inflict damage. They curl out of their handles and can’t hurt you. They make others bleed, not you.

You get the best feeling whenever you win. You always check for a pulse like a sensible person. At times, when you’re not sure if they’re dead or not, you cut off their head. Just to stay on the safe side.

It’s ridiculous how many trolls you’ve killed because they happened to see you bleed.

There are times when you look out the window and see a passing culling drone. On rarer occasion, you sneak a glance at one when you’re out. They’re terrifying either way.

All you can think of is no, not me, don’t turn around, please don’t notice me, please don’t notice me.  
♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋♋

♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌  
You forgot your claws. It isn’t often that you do, seeing as you mostly choose to not carry them. Oh well.

You balance yourself on the branch you’re squatting on and then pounce down at your prey. You bite its neck before it has time to notice what’s going on. Its spine breaks under your teeth. Snap. Hee hee, such a funny sound!

You load the carcass on your shoulders and lick some blood off your face. You run for your hive, hyperaware of the stench that could attract larger beasts. You want this one to be your last hunt of the night, seeing as the sun is about to rise, so you run in silence and enjoy the quiet of the forest, the noise of the little animals going about their business. Cute little noises. Like the snap. Snap!

You fight the urge to giggle when you hear something large walking around. You stop running to really listen – two feet, kinda heavy for an animal around this side of the forest. You sniff the air and – yep. That’s a highblood alright.

You set your prey down, because at this point it’s just giving your location away, and crouch down to hide in the rich flora. You move around until you have a visual on the intruder. They don’t see you, but they see the carcass, which is about the same thing. They inhale through the nose – searching for more blood, hoping to find the beast’s killer – and you circle around them, getting blood all over the place.

They’re clumsy, their every movement makes noise. They seem confused as to your location and turn to the dead animal as if that’ll have the answers.

You ponder whether killing them is worth the trouble of keeping the carcass – you already have more than enough food and you hate killing trolls. Not to mention, judging by their general attitude, this one isn’t from a forest and has no idea what they’re doing. The wildlife will kill them sooner or later.

You wait a few minutes. The highblood continues to puzzle over the dead animal. A lusus approaches. A large one. Purrrrfect.

The troll moves too loud too wrong too late.

Snap!

You carry your prey to your cave at ease, leaving a little bit of the juiciest meat as a thank-you for the lusus that saved you the trouble.  
♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌♌

♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍  
Wrumvrumvrumvrumvrumvrum

You take the needle off and look closely at the seams for the millionth time. You decide it looks good enough. For now.

Glancing at your window, you notice it’s almost midday. Time sure flies when you do something you love. You fold the garment on the desk and take a good look out the window.

Oh great. These guys again.

You grab your lipstick and storm down your hive. You are so sick of those undead piles of flesh! Why don’t they just stop. Coming. Back. Again. And again!

Ugh, you hate it when they just stroll around like it’s nobody’s business. And your lusus! How they frighten her! Oh, your poor guardian is just so sensitive to injury. You hold the door open for her so she can get inside. You hush her and kiss her temple. You reassure her she’ll be safe inside – she reassures you she knows – and that you’ll take care of it – again, dear, she knows.

You look down and - ah, no. This dress is too fancy for a fight, not to mention just recently crafted. You don’t want to strain it so early in its existence. You switch to something more casual.

Much better.

You turn to the approaching mass of undead and close the door behind you. You swing your lipstick around and take a few steps forward.

Wrumvrumvrumvrumvrumvrumvrum  
♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍♍

♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎  
It’s funny, see?

Because he wouldn’t stop bugging you about his stupid issues and now he’s but a limp decoration for your tree. He’s not so – hehe – hung up about it anymore. It’s funny!

Oh, nobody appreciates your humor around here. No wonder, considering nobody hangs about. Heheh.

Are you right or what? Huh? Huuuh? Your lusus doesn’t respond. She doesn’t share your sense of humor. Hell, she doesn’t share much, period.

The only thing you two share is a psychic bond and a love for the color red.

You poke the hanging corpse with your cane a little more and decide you’ve had enough. Well, no not really. You could never have enough. Oh, how you’d just love to have corpses rotting around your hive with nooses around their thin, thin necks, how you’d love to see which bits decompose and fall to the ground first! And think of all the skeletons you could gather! All the scales you could balance with those skulls! It’s funny because they’d be judged even after their deaths!

But, alas, you can’t keep the corpses. All bodies you gather go to the Make Sure Your Sister Doesn’t Get Eaten By Her Own Lusus campaign.

So you untangle the corpse and let it drop to the ground. You don’t really feel like dragging it around right now. You just leave it there. She’ll come pick it up at some point.

It’s funny, see?

Oh wait.

You can’t.  
♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎♎

♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏  
Oh, how nice of her to leave a body there for you. Really sweet. Just drop it there in the middle of the forest where absolutely no wildlife will be able to get to it, ever. Not like it could get eaten in the first few minutes, no, of course not.

She’s just lucky it didn’t actually get eaten.

You carry it back to your hive and throw it on the heap. Oh good, she hasn’t woken up yet. You think this should be enough to keep her satisfied for a bit.

You make your way up to your hive and climb over to your neighbor. You have him do a quick check up on your arm and then you climb back, get in gear and load up a game.

Sweet. It’s all-you-can-get night.

And there’s a bunch of lowbloods playing tonight, too. This time you think you’ll see just how many of them you can control at once.

Their minds are welcoming. They’re warm and pulsing with life, unable to resist and ignorant to your presence. Careless, naive, clueless, silly, oh-so-willing to obey your commands.

You have a bit of an overload, but if you break the bond now they’ll find out and then they won’t cooperate as easily. You keep pushing. Your eye hurts. You make a few of them pass out so the mindload eases up a bit.

  
It helps.

You walk the rest to your hive, slightly nervous to discover your lusus has woken up and made short work of the heap of bodies you had for her. You hold the lowbloods still as she devours them.

You don’t always get out of their minds in time and some nights you’re a little more eager to feed her.

You know what it’s like to be eaten by her.  
♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏♏

♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐  
You don’t leave your hive much.

Food is easy to come by and modern technology makes socialization easy – for you in particular, considering your respiration issues.

You finish tidying up the tools you use to maintain your neighbor’s mobility and dare a look down the window.

Ugh. It’s a rainbow down there.

It’s disgusting even though you know the vile lusus will lick the blood clean until her next meal. A chill goes down your spine at the thought and you force your sight away.

You observe one of your latest projects. It’s smashed to bits. One punch straight through the material, and then one more crushing the side because you had thought ahead and added a secondary core that would allow it to operate for a few minutes after the main core’s destruction. It worked, so you note to keep this tactic in mind from now on.

You glance at your hands. Blue bruises on your knuckles and half-moon scratches on the heels of your palms, where your claws dug in. Nothing important here.

You move to a mirror and check your face, if only to determine whether you should switch to another metal or not. You probably shouldn’t, there’s a new crack on your shades and a beautiful blooming of blue on your jaw and cheek. You take you glasses off and note that the blue marks under your eyes have spread further down – the left a little darker and lower than the right.

You might switch to a harder material in the future. For now, this will do.

You put your glasses back on, wash the blood off your hands and out your mouth – which is still bleeding even though it’s been almost an hour since you spat out a tooth – roll your shoulders, dry your face.

You move the project on a clear desk and begin to disassemble it – destroy first, create second.  
♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐♐

♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑  
There’re colors in the corners of your eyes and your hands look like they’re trembling, even though you don’t feel them doing that. You don’t feel them period. You don’t feel anything.

You try moving your limps and manage to flail just the tiniest bit. You try again and yep, okay, you’re good.

Your vision goes bright and shapeless and there are rainbows blurring in and out of your sight. You have no idea how long you stay blind – are you blind? – like that, but when you become aware of your surroundings again you notice they’re different.

(You’ve moved you idiot.)

You’re outside and the waves are loud, too loud, far louder than what they usually sound. There’s movement at the sky and you look up to see the clouds having curious colors.

There’s a perfect straight line across your vision and what’s over the top of it seems distorted on the bottom, but you can tell the colors are the same before the line fades away and all you can see is hues again.

(Your hallucinations hide the horizon, moron.)

You maintain your sense of touch for a little bit. There’s pressure on your hands and they’re cold and next thing you know you can’t feel anything, you can’t see anything but you can hear the waves, loud loud loud, and you can smell what you assume is salt but it’s colder and it smells alive.

You get to see the line once more and you feel your arms trembling so you look down and-

Is that blood on your hands?

You smell salt that lives and waves that crash against something other than the coast but for now, just now, it’s quiet and the salt lost its life.

(You murderer.)  
♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑♑

♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒  
You take pride in being one of the few trolls who can kill lusii.

Of course, it takes endless rides on your own and vicious hunting and a restless schedule to actually get to do it but whatever. It’s worth it.

You also take pride in your ability to wield Ahab’s Crosshairs – one-handed no less. The whole thing is almost as tall as you and you’ve had it in your specibus since you were just a tiny little fish.

And yet, most of all, you take pride in having quadranted the heiress. The heiress!

That’s why it’s worth it. That’s why you spend your every waking moment hunting beasts four times your size. That’s why you ride your own guardian as if he’s a tool that exists only to move you. That’s why you don’t complain, not ever (not to her). Not for the time you’ve lost off your life –as long as you can remember – not for the lives you’ve taken – 612 lusii and 112 trolls and counting – not for the scars you’ve earned.

A slice straight across your chest and to your right shoulder; a bite mark so vicious it should’ve cut your leg off at the knee; a smaller bite mark (made by a troll) on your wrist and a twin of it just a few inches higher up your arm; at least four stab wounds on your torso, three on the small of your back and one on your sides; hands scrapped so much your palms are only scar tissue.

But it’s worth it, it’s worth it.

You get to be so close to the princess you wouldn’t change it for anything – except maybe for the chance to be as close as you want to actually be.

  
Because you love every last minute you spend with her. Don’t you?

  
Don’t you like her meddling and her want to improve you and her attempts at gaining your secrets and her very real need to save you from yourself? It’s not like you push her away at every chance and shoot down her tries and pull away when she so much as hugs you because you can’t just come out and admit that this is not what you want, this is not what she needs, this is hurting both of you so much, so much you’re better off alone.

But it’s okay.

It’s worth it, it’s so worth it.  
♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒♒

♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓  
Yes, mother?

You hear her whispers and listen to her needs because nobody else can. And if nobody does, she’ll die, or kill everyone and then die.

I’m listening, mother, speak to me.

You hurl the little ones around until she can reach them (what little ones? They’re at least four times your size, if not more). You feed her and listen to her, sometimes you talk but she doesn’t bother to really listen.

No, mother, I’m not hurt, I still will serve you.

When some of the little ones put up a fight, she hugs you tight, so tight you can’t breathe, and even though you can’t drown you feel like suffocating. When she lets you go you rasp one big breath and as you look at yourself you fail to find the slightest hint of a fight.

Soon, I promise, soon.

You remember sleeping and then waking up in a purple world of tall towers and cute chess pieces. You remember the whispers crushing your skull and forcing you to act. You remember the pain of your own thoughts waking you up, but they weren’t really your thoughts, were they? No, they were shoved in your head and they messed with your mind.

Mother, please, I beg of you.

You remember her introducing you to her brothers and sisters and siblings as if they were friends, as if you were supposed to get along with them, as if they weren’t in the process of forcing you out of your own brain.

I love you, mother. No, I mean it.

You never meant it.  
♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓♓


End file.
